OMB expects better grades on next report card

When the next report from the President’s Management Agenda comes out later this month, the Office of Management and Budget expects agencies to have made significant progress in meeting the goals the agenda has set.Robert Shea, counsel to OMB’s deputy director for management, said agencies better understand what it takes to improve their scores.“We are getting some traction on measuring performance,” Shea said today at a conference on performance metrics sponsored by the Digital Government Institute. “The framework is in place from where we can make progress.”Shea said OMB will start evaluating agencies next week and will release a scorecard on the first six months of fiscal 2003 around April 18.OMB measures agencies’ progress on five management areas for the scorecard: e-government, human capital, competitive sourcing, budget performance integration, and financial management. Human capital is probably the most important area, Shea said, but it receives the least amount of attention.“With the expected wave of retirements [of federal workers] coming, hiring and retention of employees can get caught up in too much bureaucracy,” he said.OMB also will release the second version of the Business Reference Model, part of the Federal Enterprise Architecture, according to Bob Haycock, acting chief architect of the FEA Program Management Office.The new version will more clearly depict government functions than the previous one. The Performance Reference Model, which OMB also will release soon, will combine with the Business Reference Model to give CIOs a better understanding of their IT investments. The documents will help IT officials gauge outcomes rather than outputs, Haycock said. Haycock also said agencies are taking the BRM more seriously. OMB received 150 comments on the draft of Version 2, 100 more than the number of comments on the first version.